B.O.A.T.S II: Me Time

Quick-hit satisfaction is what makes the Atlanta rapper 2 Chainz a sought-after artist for guest verses, the medium in which he has carried out a world-conquering campaign over the past two years. His new B.O.A.T.S. II can be clumsy but the low stakes also yield some surprises.

Featured Tracks:

"Feds Watching" [ft. Pharrell]

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2 Chainz

Quick-hit satisfaction is what makes Atlanta rapper 2 Chainz such a sought-after artist for guest verses, the medium in which he truly shines and in which he has carried out a world-conquering campaign over the past two years. For rap fans and casual radio listeners alike, the deeply accented “Tru!” ad lib or the equally joyous “2 Chaiiiinz” have taken on a Pavlovian quality, signalling the immediate thrill of 16 bars of pure absurdity and dirty jokes. Even when the punchlines don't land quite right, it's impossible to turn away. There's a certain exuberant commitment to the delivery, and that voice, which sounds pinched yet fully possessed. Listening to 2 Chainz is a compulsive act.

Leading up to the release of the first 2 Chainz album, Based on a T.R.U. Story, these qualities seemed like telling indicators of a new rap superstar on the rise. Accordingly, that album was an event, the product of the rapper formerly known as Tity Boi’s unlikely decade-plus career finally coming together in one release. In contrast, the follow-up, B.O.A.T.S. II: Me Time, arrived with almost no buzz, each of its promotional singles seeming to generate less excitement than the one before.

Yet B.O.A.T.S. II in many ways gets closer to the essential 2 Chainz appeal, perhaps unsurprisingly for an album focused on “me time.” It trades in the attempts at being a blockbuster project for a laundry list of "whoa, cool" moments, which begin in earnest as soon as 2 Chainz shouts out his stove by yelling "what up stove!" on opener "Forks". There's something refreshingly traditional about what a non-event the album is. It's as if 2 Chainz decided that his approach to 90s nostalgia would be not to make an album that sounded like that decade but rather one that applied the high-budget, slapped-together vibe of a minor Bad Boy-era release to the sounds of modern Atlanta. There's even a verse from Ma$e, and it's fantastic.

Much of the album's first half is what has become formulaic 2 Chainz at this point: Massive, booming beat, shouted short phrase for a hook, and non sequitur punchlines that sound like he's reading a list of one-liners out of a notebook. At its best, as on "Where You Been", this approach yields disjointed brilliance like "If you wrote an autobiography you'd have to sue yourself/ Your lyin' ass/ Codeine in my wine glass." 2 Chainz going at full tilt-- purposefully butchering the pronunciation of clothing brand Comme Des Garcons, for instance-- finds himself a riot and forces us to agree. At the same time, his approach can veer toward the latter-day Lil Wayne tendency to rattle off punchlines like Mad Libs.

Also like Wayne, who drops by for a lively verse within Drake's verse on fun, douchey highlight "I Do It", 2 Chainz's bars can skirt the border between WTF and tasteless. On the grandiose, cinematic "U Da Realest", for instance, he delivers a heartfelt series of RIPs before undercutting them with the line "I died in her cervix." There are two pretty terrible songs that are both about uploading sex tapes to the Internet, the better of which, “Netflix”, is partly redeemed by Fergie, of all people, stopping by to rap. Elsewhere, the loose approach yields duds like 90-second cocaine measurement tutorial "36", which is exactly the half-baked fragment its runtime promises it will be, and a misplaced spoken word intro on "Black Unicorn".

B.O.A.T.S. II can be clumsy, but the low stakes also yield some great surprises in the album's second half. The plinking synths and rumbling guitars of Wonder Arillo's beat on "Extra" push 2 Chainz into a fantastically deliberate half-time flow until current Atlanta wunderkind Rich Homie Quan swoops in for a thrilling half-sung verse. "Mainstream Ratchet" takes full advantage of DJ Montay and Big Korey beat with dubstep-grade amounts of low end, while "So We Can Live" matches T-Pain to a boom-bap beat complete with record scratches, to great effect. It's here, where 2 Chainz furthers the throwback East Coast vibe with a rare stab at storytelling, and on "Outroduction", which offers an unusually clear-eyed look at the rapper's career arc, that the reason 2 Chainz is so fun to listen to becomes most apparent.

On "Outroduction," he shares an anecdote that starts off wistful about a partner in jail calling to wish a Happy New Year. Then 2 Chainz gets the audible equivalent of a glint in his eye and shouts out-- not rhyming, just thrilled at the absurdity of it all-- "I had to tell him: nigga it's March!" B.O.A.T.S. II is an album that feels happy just to exist, a rejection of the modern idea that album releases are serious events and all the tracks that sound like they were fun to make get relegated to bonus cuts or mixtapes. The belief in the album as an entertaining product is similarly captured by the decision to include a cookbook of 2 Chainz's favorite tour recipes with the deluxe edition. 2 Chainz entertains us because he understands the wackiness of what he's doing, and he performs with a wink. He's a unique form of the American dream: The tru story of the guy who worked hard and, after a long career that could leave anyone jaded, emerged successful and seemingly less jaded than ever.